I have lodged my complaints for a long time regarding Kansas City’s $100 million trolley proposal. In short, it is yet another unnecessary government-centric development proposal that would raise taxes on residents and business owners already enduring some of the highest tax rates in the Midwest.

There is, of course, another (and better) way to fund this trolley, and the Kansas City Star’s Lewis Diuguid articulates it quite clearly: private funding.

So instead of heaping more taxes on those folks, Mayor Sly James and the City Council should begin an all-out, metrowide streetcar fundraising drive. Fundraisers helped build other great bricks-and-mortar things for the city.

The Central Library downtown is a wonderful example. So is the addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

People contributed to the construction of the Kauffman Center and the World War I Museum. Corporations metrowide, foundations and individuals could do the same for streetcars.

Private fundraising for ostensibly public projects is not a new idea, and as Diuguid highlights, that is especially true for Kansas City.

The city’s proposal already contemplates user fees and advertising to supplement the public financing component. Shouldn’t the Kansas City Council take the next step and explore the possibility of philanthropy and private investment, and work to remove the public component? And if there is neither a private nor philanthropic interest in building the streetcar, doesn’t that say something about the merits of the project?

The Missouri General Assembly’s 2012 session is over. How did the legislature do?

The Good: With most current elected officials disinterested in fixing Missouri’s tax credit binge, much of the “good news” here is what the legislature did not do. For one, a piece of legislation that resurrected part of 2011’s failed Aerotropolis tax credit boondoggle failed to make it out of the Senate. Another piece of legislation that would have expanded and created several tax credit programs without fixing the state’s out-of-control development scheme also failed.

The Bad: A compromise proposal that the Senate passed late in the session would have cut the cap on the Historic Preservation Tax Credit by almost half, from $140 million per year to $75 million. While not a perfect piece of legislation, it was probably the single-best chance for genuine tax credit reform this session. Not surprisingly, it died without a vote in the House.

The Sad: Tax credits remain one of the state’s most pressing areas for reform, and yet there appears to be few courageous leaders willing to take the reins and lead the charge to reform the system, either modestly through sunsets and caps, or audaciously, through a wholesale swap and elimination of the corporate income tax. Reform will come, but whether it will be forced on the legislature or whether it acts proactively on its own accord remains to be seen.

The legislative session is over. How did the Missouri Legislature fare in the area of health care?

The Good: The Legislature will submit to voters a referendum that would block the governor from unilaterally implementing ObamaCare. I have written about this in the past and had researched last September what the governor could do unilaterally. I expect Missourians will add an exclamation point to the state’s opposition to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) with the referendum, not unlike Missourians did with Proposition C in 2010. If passed, the referendum will deny the governor the ability to impose an ObamaCare health insurance exchange in Missouri.

Moreover, Missouri senators defeated what would have been an extension of the expensive and burdensome kindergarten optometrist mandate, an issue which I testified against. An unnecessary and inefficient imposition on Missouri’s families, the bill’s failure was the right thing for Missourians and Missouri families. This is an all-too-rare example of removing licensing-related rules and regulations in Missouri. I hope we have more of this in the future.

The Bad: In this case, really bad legislation. A bill that would have declared ObamaCare “unconstitutional” and applied criminal penalties to federal officials who would implement portions of the law in the state never made it to a vote on the floor of the Senate. Re-litigating the centuries-old notions of state interposition is neither necessary nor helpful to combating ObamaCare. The bill’s unceremonious end was warranted.

The Sad: Late last week I worried here that a bill allowing volunteer health organizations access to medically underserved Missourians would die due to a small potatoes dispute in one of the bill’s sections. To be clear, both the House and the Senate passed nearly identical versions of the bill. And yet, it died. It is a shame, bordering on shameful  that the chambers could not reconcile their differences.

As the last week of the Missouri Legislature’s regular session groans to a close, time is running out for dozens of bills to get a final up or down vote in the chambers. The Volunteer Health Services Act is one of those bills. Last week, I wrote about what a wonderful opportunity the Missouri House and Senate had to reform the licensing laws regarding volunteer medical missions in Missouri, allowing medical professionals in good standing and properly licensed in other states to provide free services to Missouri’s neediest. (I had also talked about the idea before that.) Requiring only a concurrence in the House to a lightly-amended Senate version, the House instead rejected the bill and a committee meeting was requested of the Senate to work out the differences. Whether that meeting will happen, nobody really knows.

Because the session ends tomorrow, the margin for error here is narrow.

I truly hope that the legislation is revisited and final, unambiguous judgment is rendered before the session closes. This is one of those bills that could help a lot of Missourians, not hurt them, who would otherwise go without medical assistance or would have to turn to the government for help.

There are a number of bills in the waning hours of the session that deserve attention as the minutes tick down. This is one of them.

In February, I wrote at length about an important charitable organization, Remote Area Medical (RAM), which delivers free health care to those who otherwise could not get it. Indeed, RAM and organizations like it have helped patients all around the world. As I found out from RAM’s founder Stan Brock, however, excessive Missouri licensing laws have hampered his group’s mission to help the needy in this state.

Mr. Brock told me that RAM wanted to do more in Missouri, but onerous state requirements — such as requiring licensed in-state medical personnel to participate in a clinic before RAM could provide its services — had stifled his organization on several occasions. Most recently, he said, Missouri regulations prevented RAM from providing free eyeglasses to the southwest corner of the state.

Well, Missouri may be on the verge of rectifying the problem if one bill gets to a final vote. Introduced by Rep. David Sater, House Bill 1072 appears to adopt much of the same legislative language used to facilitate volunteer medical services in Tennessee, which was a pioneer of the volunteer health services law. Better still, the legislation passed through the Missouri House in March and is now close to a vote in the Senate.

Given the movement in the health insurance exchange policy field and the Senate’s earlier allowance for a grade school optometrist mandate to lapse, this session may just be a banner one for health care policy in the state of Missouri. For more information on how burdensome occupational licensing laws affect Missouri, please check out our work in the area, which you can find here, here, and here.

Word came yesterday afternoon that the Missouri House Health Insurance Committee has finally voted to send a key piece of legislation to the full House for consideration before the close of this year’s legislative session, which ends Friday. This is the same legislation — which the Missouri Senate already passed — that Christie Herrara and I wrote about in March which, if implemented, would block the unilateral implementation of the ObamaCare exchange in the state. I expect the referendum to pass swiftly through the lower chamber and for voters to approve the measure when the question is posed to them later this year.

The process was not without its share of drama, of course. The hearing for the bill before the House Committee was held at the end of March, leaving the bill with little margin for error to get the required votes done before the legislature adjourns. But whatever the reason for the delay, the committee deserves credit for getting the job done. On to the full House.

Last month, Art Laffer and Stephen Moore wrote in the Wall Street Journal about how high taxation destroys economic growth. As they put it, “Liberal utopias are losing the race for capital. The rich, the middle-class, the ambitious and others are leaving workers’ paradises such as Hartford, Buffalo and Providence for Jacksonville, San Antonio and Knoxville.” And they note, as we have noted so many times, that taxes on income are some of the worst you can levy if you want to keep people and capital in your state.

In our new report Rich States, Poor States, prepared for the American Legislative Exchange Council, we compare the economic performance of states with no income tax to that of states with high rates. It’s like comparing Hong Kong with Greece or King Kong with fleas.

Every year for the past 40, the states without income taxes had faster output growth (measured on a decadal basis) than the states with the highest income taxes. In 1980, for example, there were 10 zero-income-tax states. Over the decade leading up to 1980, those states grew 32.3 percentage points faster than the 10 states with the highest tax rates. Job growth was also much higher in the zero-tax states. The states with the nine highest income tax rates had no net job growth at all, and seven of those nine managed to lose jobs.

There are many excellent analyses and anecdotes in Rich States, Poor States. From state-specific stats to broader policy discussions, RSPS serves as a fine starting point for assessing our states’ economic health.

But some RSPS history needs to be noted regarding the book’s specific discussion of Missouri’s “economic outlook” (RSPS’s forward-looking metric). Laffer and Moore’s observations about states without income taxes bears repeating — they have grown significantly in contrast to other income tax-reliant states — but from the perspective of policymakers and legislators here, the view RSPS paints of the Show-Me State is starting to diverge from the book’s own backward-looking “economic performance” metric.

How has Missouri done according to RSPS’s metrics over the book’s last five editions? Well, the state has risen to seventh from 25th of the 50 states in “economic outlook” over the last five years, even as its actual performance has languished by RSPS’s standards around 40th (roughly consistent with BEA and BLS statistics).

As the chart shows, the disparity between “where Missouri is going” and “where Missouri has been” has never been greater. I think that is a problem with RSPS’s “outlook” metric, not the policy Laffer and Moore advocated in the Wall Street Journal. More to the point, the state has continued to flail in growth, arguably in part because the state continues to cling to its income tax and tax credit system, rather than shifting to a more effective, and less destructive, taxing system that does not pick winners and losers and does not penalize income.

Unfortunately, that hugely important point could get clouded when people see Missouri’s “outlook” ranking, which only considers the impact of income taxes as fractional, evenly-weighted components among more than a dozen factors of varying real-life importance. Missourians across the ideological spectrum do not agree on much, but what they certainly do agree on is that Missouri’s economic status quo is unacceptable and is not improving. In substance, Laffer and Moore agree with that assessment, despite what RSPS’s “outlook” metric suggests.

The pathway to state growth that Laffer and Moore articulate is a clear one; Missouri is lacking only the political will and leadership to take it over the finish line. The outlook for finding that sort of political leadership, unfortunately, is decidedly more mixed, and while it remains mixed, Missouri’s economic performance will continue to suffer.

We do not often wade into the waters of election policy, but frankly, election policy is intimately related to the free-market objectives we promote. Although voters are one step removed from the chambers that decide most policy issues, the only way elected representatives can fairly represent the will of the people is if the representatives themselves have been fairly elected. Debasement of the electoral process through fraudulent voting subverts the will of voters and disenfranchises voters themselves. And yet on Monday, Mother Jones called the states’ moves to get their arms around the problem and implement stronger ID requirements “loathsome.”

Let’s be clear: Voter fraud is real. Especially in recent weeks, the push has been on to paint “voter fraud” as some sort of manufactured controversy, but as someone who has worked in this field, I can assure you, it is not. From county officials telling poll workers that people can vote with a credit card as their ID — they cannot — to the use of absentee ballots fueling fraud, there is not only ample room for voter fraud to take place through the very structure of the voting process, but there have been cases of voter fraud suspected and prosecuted in the state just in the past few years.

Voter fraud can swing elections, especially close ones. If voter fraud constitutes 2 percent, or 1 percent, or even 1/2 percent of the vote total, how many races does that affect? How many statewide and local races have you seen decided by a point or less, and how likely is it that none of those races turned on fraudulent votes?

Every vote should count, every vote should be protected, and every attempt to distort the will of the electorate with the casting of illegal ballots should be turned back. Preventing voter fraud through reasonable identification measures that we already accept to drive cars, board airplanes, and enter some government buildings is not an undue burden on voters’ rights to vote. Rather, it is a burden on voters’ rights to allow the floodgates of voter fraud and abuse to remain open.

Here at the Show-Me Institute we review a lot of bad proposed and enacted legislation, but every once in a while, we find something that could be a gem. I think such a bill may be Senate Bill 661, which in just three pages sows the seeds for a massive realignment of Missouri’s development schema. The bill, introduced by Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Dist. 15), is now on its way to a full vote in the Senate. Among other things, the bill would cut Missouri’s 6.25 percent corporate income tax by half within five years to:

• 5.625 percent for 2012;
• 5 percent for 2013;
• 4.375 percent for 2014;
• 3.75 percent for 2015; and
• 3.125 percent for 2016 and beyond.

Show-Me Institute Policy Researcher Michael Rathbone and I have talked again and again and again (and again!) about reducing the corporate income tax, which is one of the most destructive taxes in terms of economic growth. As we have argued, eliminating wasteful economic development tax credits would make up for much of the cost of a corporate income tax elimination, assuming legislators are seeking to make the tax cut revenue neutral. SB 661 does not go quite that far — focusing only on tax reduction and not on development tax expenditures — and admittedly, the draw-down is slower than I would like, but it is a great idea and the right direction for Missouri policy.

Who knows? If Missouri starts phasing out its corporate income tax, perhaps the wastefulness of the state’s economic development tax credit system will become clearer.

As a lawyer whose job here includes reading laws and legislation much of the day, there are few things that irk me more than poorly-drafted copy. (Sometimes I even wonder whether some laws are poorly drafted on purpose.) But exquisitely complex sections like this one from Missouri Senate Bill 837 really take the cake:

It is the general assembly’s intent that this subdivision be interpreted as set forth in the Missouri cases of High Life Sales Company v. Brown-Forman Corporation, 823 S.W.2d 493 (Mo. 1992) and Brown-Forman Distillers Corp. v. McHenry, 566 S.W.2d 194 (Mo. 1978), rather than in Missouri Beverage Company, Inc. v. Shelton Brothers, Inc., 796 F. Supp. 2d 988 (W.D. Mo. 2011), aff’d, 11-2456 (8th Cir. February 28, 2012). Further, the general assembly declares that the federal court’s interpretation of this subdivision set forth in Missouri Beverage Company, Inc. v. Shelton Brothers, Inc., 796 F. Supp. 2d 988 (W.D. Mo. 2011), aff’d, 11-2456 (8th Cir. February 28, 2012) should be abrogated in favor of the preceding cases . . .

In a nutshell, the Missouri Legislature is referencing court rulings while trying to write a law instead of . . . actually writing the law. This is one of those proposed sections that make lawyers and special interests salivate and just about everyone else grimace in distaste and confusion. Unless you know what the court cases cited here do and do not say, it is almost impossible to understand how to best comply with the law. In a very real way, the law being “created” is not itself in the law. That is laziness, or worse.

What makes this particular instance especially bad is that it is fairly clear, given the apparent source of the law’s impetus, that this new, convoluted law could ultimately hurt consumers. The jumble of cases laid out above does not make that reality even remotely clear, which may very well be the point.

But whatever the reason for this proposed legislation, that it has been written in this form without clearly and unambiguously articulating what the new law will actually be as a result of this section — and relying on courts to de facto make the law through this sort of legislative reference — should be frustrating to taxpayers, policymakers, and companies alike. The legislature can, and should, do better.

For our regular readers, the fact that the Kansas City Power & Light District (P&LD) is hemorrhaging taxpayer money is no surprise. For those just finding out about the problems that have beset P&LD over the last few years, the Wall Street Journal’s report on the city’s budgetary mismanagement is as sobering as it is galling. The headline puts it succinctly: “Urban Center Is Budget Hole.” (Video via Tony’s Kansas City.)

The P&LD was a bet made in the 2000s that will cost the city $10 million-plus per year for years to come. Yet, the city refuses to learn its lesson. Kansas City officials persist in pursuing a massive new publicly-financed hotel project downtown and  an expensive new streetcar system that will burden local businesses with taxes they do not want. We are talking about a city with one of the worst debt loads and tax levels in the region, and the solution — with the benefit of hindsight — is more debt and higher taxes? Pair it with the ongoing border war the city has with its Kansas rivals, and it is clear that the city is not embarking on a credible development strategy, but a road to ruin.

Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray that “there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” Kansas City is getting its press for sure, but as it does its best to keep up appearances with its spend-spend-spend strategy, it ratchets up the risk of debasing its tax resources, wrapped within that thin, debt-laden facade. On the outside, things may look good. On the inside, the city is almost assuredly disfiguring itself, one act at a time.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that the city has sent out new maps setting out where food trucks can set up shop downtown. Already restricted, the location possibilities for food trucks appear to be getting even more limited, and that’s bad news for food trucks and customers alike.

The updated map draws a 200-foot no-parking-zone around every brick-and-mortar restaurant in the Downtown Vending District, which runs roughly from 18th Street east to Interstate 70/55 and from Cole Street south to Chouteau Avenue.

The trucks also are not allowed within 200 feet of other types of street vendors or within several blocks of Busch Stadium, America’s Center and the Edward Jones Dome. A previous version of the map included suggested areas where food trucks could park; the new version does not.[...]

“Like any new industry or trend, as soon as everyone jumps in, the regulations follow, which often makes sense. In this case, I think the city is over-regulating,” Pi Pizzeria owner Chris Sommers said. “They do need to protect existing businesses, but the 200-foot rule plus the silly Cardinals and Convention Zones are too much.”

You can find the new map here. As we’ve noted in the past, creating special protections like these runs afoul of good policy and the facilitation of greater consumer choice. The city’s new map accentuates and enhances these ongoing mistakes.

For instance, why in the world does Starbucks need protection from taco wagons? Starbucks sells coffee and pastries. That has nothing to do with the food that, for example, Seoul Taco sells.

Why can’t a mobile sandwich shop like Taste-D-Burger set up shop on a block where a bevy of sandwich shops — upscale and down — are already competing against one another, and many for years?

Why is there a halo around this storefront when The Crack Fox doesn’t even open until 3pm, well after the food truck lunch rush?

And here’s my favorite: Why does Papa John’s, which can deliver pizzas across the food truck map, get protections around its brick-and-mortar store, and get de facto protections for its delivery routes around the brick-and-mortar stores of others?

I have to disagree with the owner of Pi’s assessment that the city needs to be “protecting” existing businesses. There are blocks upon blocks of downtown real estate where lunch is served in permanently-located restaurants well-within the 200 foot halos the city has constructed around neighboring shops — permanent locations that are almost certainly greater threats to each other than the food trucks themselves. But even if you wanted to make sure taco joints weren’t being displaced by mobile taco stands parking on their doorstep, the present regulation is far too over-broad to equitably accomplish that goal.

A food truck taco stand couldn’t sell tacos within 200 feet of a storefront that’s closed at lunch, for Pete’s sake. That’s a policy that Saint Louisans will have a hard time digesting.